Thorstein Veblen and the Enrichment of Evolutionary Naturalism (review)

The extension of the scientific method to diverse areas of inquiry both within and outside the traditional reach of science is considered to be a central task by the thinkers classified as American Philosophical Naturalists. For philosophers like Dewey naturalism is not coextensive with the ontological thesis that the only things that exist are those in the ontology of the physical sciences or with the epistemological thesis that the production of knowledge is the sole purview of science narrowly construed. Within the naturalistic framework it is a guiding belief that the process of inquiry, as both the investigation of nature from the human perspective and also as part of nature itself, could be successful in illuminating the problems of both nature and human life. Rick Tilman's new book Thorstein Veblen and the Enrichment of Evolutionary Naturalism is an engaging study of the ways in which philosophical naturalism provided the underlying theoretical framework for the diverse topics on which Veblen wrote. Further, Tilman's book shows how Veblen's writings, especially in economics and sociology, represent the blooming of the naturalistic perspective in the area of the social sciences. Although Tilman does not present Veblen as a philosopher, he argues that evolutionary naturalism, or a philosophy much like it, best provides Veblen with the necessary metaphysical structure to support his work in economics, sociology and cultural criticism. This book should be of note to anyone who is interested in understanding the ways in which the naturalistic perspective grew to become pervasive in all areas of American thought in the early 20^th Century and the ways in which Thorstein Veblen contributed to its expansion.

After a brief biological sketch of Veblen (Chapter 1), Tilman lays out what he considers to be the central tenets of evolutionary naturalism and the ways in which they are congruent with Veblen's thought in Chapter Two: "Veblen, Evolutionary Naturalism and Secular Humanism." Tilman locates Veblen's acceptance of philosophical naturalism in its opposition to supernatural explanations and the rejection of the common dichotomy between human beings and nature. Further, naturalism can serve as an investigatory tool to adjudicate and differentiate various claims using the notion of experience as the common arbiter. Tilman describes this dual aspect of naturalism as follows: "For Veblen, then, naturalism was both a presupposition and a tool for investigative inquiry, that is, a heuristic device. Evolutionary naturalism enables us to judge other meta-theories, metaphysical positions, methodological attitudes, and heuristic theories" (p. 19). By treating cultural and social institutions, including human values and practices, as natural evolutionary processes it is possible to apply experiential criteria as evidence for knowledge claims made about those processes and institutions. One illustration of the methodological use of evolutionary naturalism that Tilman points to is Veblen's sociology of knowledge where he utilized the naturalistic perspective as a critical lens through which he satirized economists and sociologists who claimed a value-free perspective (p.302 and Chapter 9). Since Veblen's naturalism committed him to the view that valuation and the social production of knowledge take place within nature as natural processes attempts to obscure this fact are deserving of his mockery.

As a naturalist, Veblen believed that human life was "merely a derivative of the biological template and sociocultural conditioning" (p. 22), and Tilman deftly describes how this belief influenced his sociological and economic views. However, Tilman takes care to note that it is difficult to locate Veblen's views on traditionally philosophical concerns such as the relationship between the physical and non-physical aspects of reality. Tilman puts this interpretative difficulty in the following way:

But did he [Veblen] believe that, while nature consists of material and nonmatieral phenomena, matter is the more fundamental in the sense that nothing nonmaterial emerges from the material? Or did he hold that there is more to be found in nature than simply matter . . . Perhaps the former rather than the latter, but since he did not ordinarily write on philosophic subjects, as such...